Film
The sequel to the 1984 cult mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap is one long bum note. By John Kinsella.
This Is Spinal Tap sequel fails on every level
In the 1984 mockumentary film This Is Spinal Tap, director Rob Reiner plays documenter Martin “Marty” Di Bergi with a suitably bland but fascinated-by-his-subject persona. With a naif, bumbling neutrality he interviews the pseudo band Spinal Tap – or “Tap” to its fans – asking obvious questions and receiving bewildering answers.
Reiner’s first film created a filmic space that suggested he loved both the medium of film and the faux rock world he was documenting – something of an achievement. I first saw the film on video a few years after it was released, and under the influence I found it funnier than it now seems after a recent rewatch. There was also a 1992 television special concert movie, A Spinal Tap Reunion – not a Rob Reiner film – that is so unspeakably bad it is unwatchable. Let’s pass over that foul incarnation in silence. And now there is another: Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
Where does one begin with a film that isn’t a film, that doesn’t work as a mockumentary and that fails on every level at highlighting the narrowness and bigotry of cock rock?
Reiner made at least two masterpieces early in his career – Stand By Me and Misery (both adaptations of Stephen King’s writing). He has done some committed, liberal-minded community work and is fully aware of the limitations of the film industry in acknowledging injustice and inequity. Tap I, whether or not it succeeded, emerged from such a sensibility. We now have a Tap II that, in trying to replay earlier skewerings, skewers itself.
I wondered how many of my mid ’80s laughs emerged from a desperate boredom, even anger, with the sanctification of so much hollow, pretentious and banal rock music. The same riffs, licks and styles, the same old sexism. I was tired of white-male strutting and posturing. Mockery such as the lead guitarist’s answer to Marty’s question about why the band’s audiences are primarily male – he says that girls are frightened by the armadillos in their pants – was withering.
This kind of awareness made This Is Spinal Tap work just enough. The infamous mini-Stonehenge set drew pseudo-metalheads into its orbit and made it a laugh they could afford to have about the industry, if not themselves. More than 40 years later, the irrelevant second film comes far too late to make any meaningful comment about the music industry, the fractures and camaraderies of band life and the thin gap between creativity and stupidity.
At the time, the fact that the band’s pastiche music bore no meaningful resemblance to heavy metal – it was more derivations of 12-bar blues rock in search of rhymes no matter the cost – didn’t really matter. That the players were just competent enough was part of the spirit of it all. It kind of worked and it kind of didn’t. It was corny, it was kitsch, made in the spirit of affectionate satire. The “skiffle to glam” journey was a feasible artifice, and that was that. Times move on, which is not altogether a bad thing, but in the case of Spinal Tap II it’s catastrophic.
It will take me some time to get my head around how badly Reiner has missed with Tap II. The band Spinal Tap, who at the end of the first film had reunited during their last American gig with a brighter future involving concerts in Japan, where – unlike anywhere else – their album Smell the Glove is charting, are called out of their post-band lives to play a final concert. Childhood friends and band founders Nigel and David reunite with bassist Derek Smalls, and add a new keyboardist, Caucasian Jeff, and a new drummer, Didi Crockett – the band’s drummers die like annual flowers – and we travel to New Orleans for the final show.
I am not going to strain my sense of dignity, if I have one left after this, with filling in more plot, because frankly there isn’t one. This is not a mockumentary: it’s nostalgic self-validation of execrable purposelessness. It features painful appearances from Paul McCartney and Elton John, who join in the music-making as a bit of ironic fun but
with a dire earnestness that undermines the pleasure that knowing kitsch can bring. One is left flailing about and wanting the misery to end.
One of the real agonies is that the old farts (there are fart jokes, after all “farts are funny”) have nothing to say about anything. A “co-manager” talks about his “Korean boy band”, who are actually Nicaraguan “identifying” as Korean, and the joke falls flat in its own lack of a broader awareness. The new drummer turns out to have a same-sex partner, which surprises old, salacious Derek. When we hear a line like “haven’t heard of the last 50 years”, it echoes not with shimmering, self-aware irony but, rather, remorseless absurdity. Reiner knows the wrongs of this but can’t direct the script or himself out of the hole.
The only good bit of the whole film is vicariously experienced in the few seconds when David absorbs the music of a couple of blues street players – but then one wonders what is not being said about the brutal reality of appropriation.
The second film tries to mirror the first, from the instruments (guitars in cheese shops and effects pedals instead of guitars so untouched they can’t even be looked at) to the signature songs such as “Big Bottom”. Lyrics such as “I’d like to sink her with my pink torpedo” might be supposed to sound even more ironic coming from old blokes, but the joke withered 40 years before they became old.
Lampoonable bands of the ’70s and early ’80s such as Jethro Tull, Hawkwind, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin are all impaled in the first film. The legacy of Tap II is to trash the legacy of Tap I. In searching for witticisms as snappy as having an amplifier going to number 11 as in Tap I, the script of Tap II strains to create punchlines. For the “world’s loudest band”, things fade into static.
The finale throws back to the “Stonehenge” scene in Tap I, with an intro evoking the druids that intones “In ancient times hundreds of years before the dawn of history”. We might expect more sting this time around, but no. The “Brit band” still trying to make it in America is left to stew in its own stale juice.
The best bits of Tap I were the comments snippets running over the end credits. Tap II uses the same technique, but the jokes are as old as the concept. In Tap I the trilithon prop was miniature and ludicrous, in Tap II it is gigantic and ludicrous. Who cares? Where is “Lick My Love Pump” when you need it?
Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is screening in cinemas nationally.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 24, 2025 as "Tapped out".
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